LearnShifting

Windows has a calculator built into it and has had one since Windows first arrived on a PC. If you have been using your smartphone to calculate numbers for the last year or two, you may have missed the fact that the humble calculator which also has a scientific calculator to satisfy those folks miss their HP Calculators of old... Ho Hum everyone says... I knew that.

But did you know that the humble calculator can now calculate differences in dates, convert area, volumes, angles and many other units.

And wait, there is more! It provides four handy little worksheets to calculate a mortgage, car lease and fuel economy in either miles or kilometres per gallon or litre.

Not bad for a humble calculator. Open calculator and click on View in the menu bar to access these goodies.

This entry was posted on January 20, 2012 at 9:22 AM and has received 161 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Today is the day we celebrate World Teachers Day.

It wasn't until I started working in education and my own child attended school did I realise the importance of schools in community. Police stations deal with many events in community that are not joyous or filled with learning (although I am sure some hard lessons are learnt by folks in that environment). Hospitals and clinics treat the sick and injured, saving and giving life but even there people are exposed to a mix of pain and suffering. An exception is greeting your newborn child or seeing someone cured.

In school there are challenges to  be sure, but we are teaching, nurturing, guiding and trying to prepare children to be the best that they can be with a value set that makes them a citizen of the planet. So today we celebrate those people who do that job of helping mum and dad guide their child along a path of learning and maybe more importantly understanding the learning.

Today is also Bill Gate's birthday, a person who like Steve Jobs has had a profound affect on the residents of this planet.

Today also marks the day that I have been using computers for longer than I have not used a computer.

Today I also have a birthday and turning 50 is always a time for a little reflection.

Last night I compiled my first iPad application and transferred it from the Mac to the iPad. It is a shocker of an app, it doesn't really do much and half the buttons didn't work, however I don't mind because at 49 and 364 days of age, I was able to do it by myself.

So thanks to a combination of Mr Gates and Mr Jobs - my 25 year involvement with computers at a professional level is something to celebrate because like the very children we are trying to inspire, mentor and teach it is self satisfying to feel that at 50 I still have the urge to bash away at something new until I know how to do it and be excited by it.

Today is also Hari Sumpah Pemuda or national youth oath day in Indonesia and it is also Bandanna Day where you can purchase a bandanna to help  youth cancer patients.

So I apologise for a self indulgent post, but hopefully the message of life long learning comes through loud and clear.... on this rather special day for me and a few others.

Now to get those two pesky buttons working!

This entry was posted on October 28, 2011 at 5:15 PM and has received 172 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Three things rolled up into one blog entry...

• IE 9.0 Release Candidate available
• Finding out how fast your connection is and what ports are being used
• Partners in Learning links to applications and solutions

This is a bit of a Microsoft Entry. I meant to write about this on Friday and things go out of control. Firstly I downloaded and installed the Internet Explorer Release Candidate 9.0. It is quite good and now we have a complete set of browsers that support the <video> tag and most of HTML5.

[More]

This entry was posted on February 14, 2011 at 1:31 PM and has received 506 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

There is a trial version of this product available with a very generous 45 day trial period. I think the ITCs working with kids in the younger years and definately in areas where literacy may be an issue should look at this add-in for the MS-Office range of products. I would love to hear if and how it is deployed.

Max's Toolbox 2010 is an early childhood interface to Microsoft® Office suitable for children in grades K through 5. The flexibility of the programs makes them suitable for teaching children of all capabilities.

A suite of three products – MaxWrite for Microsoft® Word, MaxShow for PowerPoint®, and MaxCount for Excel – gives teachers a platform for incorporating technology across a wide range of subjects and lesson plans.

There is a downloadable demo available

This entry was posted on December 1, 2010 at 5:03 PM and has received 327 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

The Microsoft Learning Suite is a freely distributed suite of materials and tools for teachers and students to use in the classroom. With almost all locations in the NT (and around Australia) using Windows and Microsoft Office as key aspects of the education operating environment, it is good that these tools are all in one place.

[More]

This entry was posted on December 1, 2010 at 2:57 PM and has received 764 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

We have a number of exceptional learning assets from the Australian Children Television Foundation. These are distributed on DVD and are in a variety of formats. The most common formats are Adobe PDF, DVD Movie, executable flash, FLV (Flash Video) and some html documents.

The challenge is to convert where required and upload the content into our network in a way that teachers can access and use within our network, but the resources cannot be copied or reused outside of the scope of our license.

The content of the DVDs should be in a format that a teacher in a remote or urban location can play the video on an electronic whiteboard or projector to the class and if a student misses out because they were absent, they can login from school or home to review the content at their convenience.

How did we do it?

[More]

This entry was posted on January 25, 2010 at 11:54 AM and has received 323 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Windows 7.0 is on the way and there are always four groups of people when it comes to software upgrades…

1.       Bleeding edge

2.       Go with the flow

3.       Why change and

4.       What is wrong with the louvers

On October 28 which is coincidently Bill Gate’s birthday (and mine) Our gold master image of Windows 7.0 will go to our computer supplier and all new computers arriving around Christmas time will have this installed.

[More]

This entry was posted on October 13, 2009 at 10:46 AM and has received 240 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.